Tuesday, August 16, 2022

He Do the Police in Different Voices, Badly

 




Rereading the Waste Land Manuscript for a talk. Surprised, once again, at how bad the draft was. This is the same writer who produced Prufrock, but had he published 'He do the Police in Different Voices' as it was, he would have been remembered as the critic who wrote Prufrock. 

How is it possible for a writer to be so good and then to be so oblivious to how dead his work had become? Or how rancid some of it was. 

(The Image shows a page from the manuscript. The diagonal line, which may be Eliot's or Pound's, strikes out the whole page.)

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